> Not saying this is a scam, but it feels like a scam.

Not directly related to your specific concern, but every attempt to make a open / democratized degree has felt like that to me, unfortunately.

Example: There was an online degree program I saw that awarded a real, regionally accredited degree from a state university. The degree and course work were exactly the same, but the online program was basically open. No admission requirements except to pay for and pass some pre-requisites that would then grant you access to the rest of the degree. The equivalent brick and motar program went through the typical admissions process.

My first thought: "this sounds very close to for-profit school".

I've attended several schools online at both the undergrad and graduate level including a for-profit school. I don't find much different between them because they've all followed an asynchronous approach.

However, UoPeople is different in that it's much, much less instructor led. They use a "peer learning" pedagogical approach. It's something I quite dislike about the school. I consider it to be poorly implemented and leads to problems like "revenge grading." However, I tolerate it because it allows me to study in a structured environment for less than I'd pay at my local community college.

It's not something I would recommend for weak learners and/or for many who need a regionally accredited degree.

I'm there not because I need it either. I graduated from a software bootcamp and I've already been working for 2 yeast, so I'm good. However I found out UoPeople and researched them a bit e.g. called a local college 's HR department to find out if they'd recognize someone with a degree from there to teach and they said yes. My next thought was to review the Visa process for a couple countries; this is my primary interest and motivation. None of them specified where the Degree came from only that it was a sanctioned/Accredited institution.

So I don't really care about the details. I learn more, great, but otherwise I'm happy because I just want to be able to apply to get into Europe or Asia as a software developer in the future and not worry about whether I have enough points, etc to pass the rigor.

All of that being said, the first course was a gong show with lots of academic violations, but like all things in life it's what you put into it and I plan on graduating with Honors, so even if it's a weak degree I'll still be able to respect my work and effort.

I assume by "first course" you mean UNIV 1001.

For those unaware, that's the "study skills, introduction to college, college success" course.

Yeah, that was pretty awful. I don't mind the material. It was nothing new to me, but the quality of discourse, grades, assessments, and so on--ugh.

With each step through the CS prerequisites, things have improved. So it seems the less prepared students either washout or get stuck doing general education courses. (Thankfully, I've got all that covered in transfer.)

Can you give some examples of 'peer learning'? I noticed OP said that about plagiarism and I was curious how that works.

The problem with all forced group work and not being able to choose the group is you get a very mixed quality of effort and talent. I'd stay away from any program that pushed that heavily.

"Peer learning" is implement primarily in two ways at UoPeople.

The first is through discussion forums. We are required to post a response to a discussion prompt each week. We return to write a minimum of three responses to our peers, and we also assess their response on a scale of 0-10.

The idea is that peers will touch on different aspects, extend one another's learning, and engage in further discussion. In reality, we end up getting "great post" responses most of the time and minimal effort put in by our peers. That's not always the case, but it happens enough that I don't think it's actually helpful or a meaningful approach.

The other means is through peer assessment of regular assignments (e.g., 'papers,' programming assignments, etc.). We submit these one week, and then our peers read/study and assess our assignments based on established criteria. Peers are supposed to provide feedback on each aspect and then an overall response.

Again, the idea is that we learn through studying and responding to our peers. In reality, most students make minimal effort. So most of the time my assessment responses are limited to "good job." So, not really beneficial. (I've had a few really good responses, but it's rare.)

As for group work, I'm not aware of any instances of that at the school. (I've had it in graduate courses in the past, and I don't like it.)

I really do not like the "peer learning" system at UoPeople. I think it can work, but I don't think you've done a good job of implementing it. And instructors that I've had to date only have minimal interaction with students. (Though, I don't really need it, so it doesn't concern me much.) I've considered transferring several times, but the idea of paying $1-2k per course at a state school vs. $100 per course at UoPeople doesn't appeal to me. (As I've noted elsewhere, I'm not doing this primarily for the degree. Instead, it's about learning for me.)

Local community college online classes has that same mandatory writing something and responding 3 times. I really disliked it. Forcing that sort of thing with such specific requirements made it so the majority were talking without much care at all. I was the same as I don’t like the forced interaction. At least the way it was set up.

This is a common approach used in online courses. I taken both undergrad and grad courses which required it, and it doesn't really help raise the level of discourse. I don't like it for that reason. It comes across as "make work."

>It's not something I would recommend for weak learners and/or for many who need a regionally accredited degree.

I should hope not given the fact that they are not regionally accredited and now that they have finally applied they likely won't be for another 2-3 years. Assuming they pass.

In principle, this could work if the school maintained high standards and allowed everyone to attempt to pass their courses + eventually attain the degree. Having an online platform without limitations (or with less limitations) in instructor resources allows legitimate programs to pursue this model.

To my knowledge, the difference with for-profit schools is that you are essentially guaranteed a degree by enrolling and paying the tuition and fees. If the for-profit institution actually had a good reputation, I can imagine they could also implement more restrictive policies. But the way academia works, a large part of prestige comes with history - and this makes it nearly impossible for new schools to break into this echelon of elites. I suspect it's also for the same reason that for-profit schools are not able to consistently attract talent in terms of instruction, since the ones who can would prefer to be employed by more prestigious institutions.

> To my knowledge, the difference with for-profit schools is that you are essentially guaranteed a degree by enrolling and paying the tuition and fees.

A large majority of students who start at the University of Phoenix fail to graduate. The guarantee you speak of does not exist, not because the standards are high, but because the average student admitted to these universities is incapable of the work, or too disorganized to do so. There are plenty of not for profit universities who admit similar students and they don’t graduate either.

I won't name names since I've buried the hatchet but here's a story along those lines.

During a hotly contested political debate in my city a person who called himself a doctor (psych therapist, to be precise) showed up at a council meeting and threatened a city council member from my district.

Being the data-fluent person I am I offered to help, so I pulled all of the person in question's educational, legal, and accrediting history to see what would turn up.

It turned out that the person was a state employee before moving to my state but was fired after burning a car for insurance fraud during a divorce. In fairness to him he admitted to that crime and paid his fines, restitution, and community service and what not, but he could no longer work for the government in his previous role (police) after being convicted. So he managed to get himself into an online psych program like the one you're describing (from a state university, but awfully scam-looking), which got him an Education degree, not a medical degree. In short, he could have been a high school guidance counselor and that's about it. But what his online undergrad and master's degrees in psych education did get him was the ability to make his entry into a PhD program look legitimate. But wait, you say, what would make any PhD program accept such a person who had a sketchy online undergrad and master's degree?

Presumably it's a lot easier to stomach such a PhD candiate if the university in question is in the African nation of Malawi, and is affiliated with the evangelical church that the person in question attends in the US. The Malawi university was one of the African universities that was churning out PhDs in suspect STEM disciplines back in the early 2000s to go around publishing papers about "intelligent design" if you remember those days. If you don't, it was the latest in a long line of hare brained evangelical attempts to end-around Charles Darwin in textbooks in the early 2000s. To this day, the person in question advertises himself as a "Christian hypnotherapist" providing all of the usual counseling services, and has an ID in the government medical provider database so he can accept Medicare, Medicaid, and insurance payments. The state I live in has since tightened up applications for medical licenses for people moving in from out of state. Previously, they had what seemed to be a fast-track process for people licensed in other states that did not involve re-checking educational credentials (that was in the late 90s/early 00s).

So I could discern from looking at all of this that there was likely some sort of coach, seminar, consultant, or similar that was training people on how to do all of this back then. If not, this guy planned the whole thing as his escape from the car burning bit and new career as a psychiatrist with shady credentials. First he got the state university degree, then the state university online masters which was fairly worthless, then the shady online PhD from Africa, then as soon as the ink was dry on his conditional (based on criminal background) therapist license in the state he lived in he moved to my state, and applied for a new license based on his existing license in his previous state, all in an attempt to get out from under the criminal record and reinvent himself as a shady psych therapist.

And it worked! As far as I know, his "medical" practice is open today.

In the process of digging all of this dirt I found other professors at other religious affiliated universities in the city I live in that had very sketchy African university credentials, including one listed as a neurosurgeon. I also found quite a few high school teachers who were making regular trips to African countries, including Malawi, from this area that they surely could not afford to make on high school teacher salaries. Those teachers per their social media profiles were all associated with the two evangelical sects in question that the car burning cop therapist and the shady neurosurgeon came from.

The likely erosion of educational legitimacy from of all of this (job markets, US university professorships, professional licenses, etc) are fairly obvious, I'd say.

> If not, this guy planned the whole thing as his escape from the car burning bit and new career as a psychiatrist with shady credentials.

Psychiatrists are medical doctors, and the rules on who gets to practice in the US are for practical purposes written by the AMA. That guy was not a licensed psychiatrist. He wouldn’t even be allowed to sit the first levels of the requisite exams.

You're right, I mixed up my 'iatrists and 'ologists.

Looks like the edit window has passed, sorry!

This sounds really interesting. Would you specify which state university?

Sure, It's the University of Colorado Boulder Masters programs hosted through Coursera:

https://www.coursera.org/degrees/msee-boulder

https://www.coursera.org/degrees/master-of-science-data-scie...

The fact that they're masters programs with performance based admissions make them even more suspicious to me, but if you're looking for bachelors programs like this I think the ASU bachelors hosted Coursera also has such an admission path.

How far do they go on the performance based admission? Must you have a Bachelor’s to be admitted? I’m currently on my last year of my Master’s and did not fulfill the usual entrance requirements but CEFIMS will let you into their Master’s programmes sans Bachelor’s though there is a bit of hoop jumping and it’s difficult to do it in the two year minimum for students who start with a Bachelor’s.

Nope, there's no bachelors degree required. I was actually pretty surprised by this when I first heard about it and I emailed them. In part of their response I quote:

Our program aims to make admission less bureaucratic (no degree, no GRE, nor recommendation letters, nor statement of purpose required), but we still are appealing to students who have the near-equivalent of a Bachelor’s degree, whether through academic study, years’ of industry experience, or, being self-taught to a high level. This is a rather rigorous program at the Masters level, equivalent to the content taught for many decades in our on-campus courses, but presented in slightly smaller pieces and in 8-week sessions, rather than 16-week semesters.

I have heard of people getting entrance to a Masters program without an bachelors degree, but not in technical disciplines and definitely not in a manner this open.

Thank you. If I ever want another Master’s I’m going to keep this in mind.

So what makes regional accreditation so great? Do other countries have it? Why can’t a major regional body go national? Is it the law? It all sounds like a scam from that to textbooks.

To somewhat oversimplify, the regional accreditation bodies (about a half dozen of them) are older and better established than the national accreditation bodies. They generally have 100+ year histories, accredit all of the major universities within their jurisdiction, and in general have acquired a great deal of respect throughout US academia.

National accreditation boards in general, and especially those that are not field-specific, are seen as being less rigorous, faster to accredit, and more profit- or prestige-motivated than the regional accreditation boards. Most are relatively new and some of the most prominent (e.g. ACICS) have been involved in specific controversy over the quality of their work. Because the regional accrediting boards are older and better respected, the first question about a university that advertises a national accreditation tends to be "why aren't they regionally accredited?". It is both symptom and cause of this difference that most for-profit and otherwise "questionable" institutions are nationally accredited and not regionally accredited.

While some national accreditation bodies are considered rigorous and respectable (e.g. ABET), they tend to be field-specific (in the case of ABET, engineering) and often require regional accreditation as a prerequisite to accredit a university, as they consider regional accreditation to be the indication that the broader learning institution is able to provide a quality program. Usually specific departments or colleges of a university will go to these types of accreditation boards to add a credential to specific programs (e.g. "ABET accredited computer science program") above and beyond the university already having a regional accreditation.

Short version: Its not great but if you want your credits to transfer you go to a regionally accredited school. Its old and spent a large part of its history entrenching itself in the American education industry, therefore its automatically granted legitimacy.

There are schools with a shit curriculum that have regional accreditation. The reason it matters to Americans is because most large universities are more significantly more accepting of transferring credits that come from a regionally accredited school.

I've been to nationally and regionally accredited schools. My degree was from a top 200 school in the US. The classes I took at the "lesser" institution were significantly more rigorous and significantly more effective at teaching skills relevant to the major I was studying.

I've known several people that went to schools that have been sued or otherwise have terrible reputations for being predatory for profit schools like ITT and the University of Phoenix. Their coursework was frequently more difficult than mine.

To be fair though, those schools were sued partly because of their shady high pressure sales tactics and for tricking people into taking on massive amounts of debt to take classes. That's pretty scummy, but based on the experiences of my friends it seemed like they at least had legitimate work to do in order to graduate.

Note: I don't doubt that on average the regionally accredited schools have been more thoroughly vetted. I'm just saying accreditation is not even close to perfect so the only reason it matters in the US is because the credits are easily transferable.

Regional accreditation is the "gold standard" in the US. National accreditation is consider below that. However, the school is accredited by the DEAC which is recognized by the US Department of Education. (Some have tried to claim the school is unaccredited, but that is false.)

I graduated from Bob Jones University. During my time there, BJU was Nationally Accredited and not Regionally Accredited.

This didn't personally affect me very much, but I know of many people who had difficulty getting into graduate school or professional work because of this.

A degree from a nationally accredited university limits your options. I'm not saying you'll be completely screwed if you get it, but not as many graduate schools will consider you.

Not yet. They started the process a few months ago.

Uopeople is not a scam . It's like every other institution of learning with qualified instructors . Make your research well before you make any comment.